Edition notes: Included in the TUMS Busking Book, arranged for SAB. PDF also contains a setting of the same text by Philip Legge, and Fine knacks for ladies by John Dowland. This edition was made directly from the facsimile reprint in Musical Times volume 113 (1972), page 856, by transposing down a perfect fourth (for the soprano) and quartering the note values.MusicXML source file is in compressed .mxl format.

Description: This famous canon at the fifth and unison or octave is now generally accepted by musicologists as not having been written by William Byrd (1542/3–1623); the late, eminent Byrd specialist Philip Brett came to the view that most of the canons attributed to Byrd were spurious.
Recent research has shown that the two related figures which form the basis of the Non nobis, Domine canon were extracted from the 5-voice motet Aspice Domine by Philip van Wilder (c. 1500–1554). In the motet both figures are set to the text-phrase Non est qui consoletur (“there is none to console”) which was presumably the text to which the original version of the canon was sung by the Elizabethan recusant community as an expression of nostalgia for the old religious order. The Non nobis, Domine text to which the canon is sung today was apparently taken from the first collect from the thanksgiving service added to the Book of Common Prayer to celebrate the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605.
The earliest source of the canon dates from 1620 to 1625 and is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in the “Bull” manuscript, MS 782, f.122v, where it is anonymous, unbarred and untexted. It is however clear from the repeated notes and the contour of the melody that this version was already designed to fit the Non nobis, Domine text, which was evidently sung in a spirit of thanksgiving for deliverance.
The canon was published anonymously in three 17th century collections, yet the earliest attribution to a specific composer was made as late as 1715 by Thomas Tudway, who ascribed it to Morley; the woefully inaccurate Dr Pepusch ascribes it to Byrd in his 1731 Treatise on Harmony; and in 1739 the theme is quoted in a concerto by Count Unico Willem van Wassenaer (formerly attributed to Pergolesi) as Canone di Palestrina! The canon is known to have been admired by Mozart and Beethoven, whomever its composer was. — Philip Legge with additions by David Humphreys